


L'appel du Vide

by Nagaina



Series: Operation Chromebook Commissions [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: CW: Alcohol References, CW: Drug References, CW: Existential Melancholy, CW: Non-explicit Sexual Implications, CW: Strong Implications of Unpleasant Criminal Activity, Character Study, Gen, Random Shimada Cousins of No Lasting Importance, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-09 03:21:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17993879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nagaina/pseuds/Nagaina
Summary: On the last day of his life as he's known it, Genji Shimada wanders the streets of Hanamura and reflects upon the past.





	L'appel du Vide

**Author's Note:**

> Operation Chromebook commission for the delightful Greensnek.
> 
> Title suggested by the equally delightful Kitsune2022.

The alarm rang, a high-pitched sonic drill that burrowed directly through Genji Shimada’s skull. It was a sound custom designed by psy-ops agents recruited from the world’s least friendly military and civilian intelligence organizations, entirely capable of cutting through any depth of ordinary sleep or extraordinary exhaustion, many forms of anaesthesia or other chemical restraint, and was more than equal to even the most thorough and dedicated drunken blackout. The total effect was not entirely unlike being stabbed repeatedly in the brain with a red-hot icepick and was in no way voluntarily ignorable. The nugget of comms technology emitting it, likewise custom designed by not particularly humane intelligence operatives with engineering degrees, was located inside his auditory canal, invisible to casual physical observation as well as active and passive forms of nonphysical detection, and was linked to his phone. The phone that sadistically skittered away from his questing fingertips as he felt blindly around for it in the dark.

“ _ Ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohthankyouthankyou _ !” The phone, mercifully, encountered an obstruction that forced it still long enough for his fingers to come firmly down on the alarm’s disengage button.

For a long moment afterwards, Genji lay still, tangled in his bedclothes, staring blankly into the dark where his ceiling would be in a few hours, breathing slow, meditative breaths and waiting for his heart rate to come back down to normal. Alarms had never been his favorite thing to wake up to, as a general rule, even less so when it was at an hour he usually only saw when he hadn’t yet gone to bed in the first place, when even the most tolerant izakaya staff would kick even the highest-paying clients to the curb and, if they were feeling merciful, might call a hovercab. Also the hour when, on the opposite side of the castle’s private living quarters, his brother would himself just be rising. He set a timer and allowed his eyes to drift mostly closed again, and in the dark behind the lids, he could see it: Hanzo, more perfectly composed immediately upon rising than most people were all day, deactivating his own alarm with a single graceful touch, sliding his legs over the edge of his floating platform bed, slipping his feet into the house slippers he’d left there hours before. A personal servant of the kumichō’s household would enter, bearing a tray containing some combination of traditional breakfast foods that Hanzo favored: natto over rice and miso soup with tofu and mushrooms, pickles and grilled fish and slices of tamagoyaki, a hot pot of tea. He would take his breakfast in his private sitting room while he reviewed the daily schedule of his duties -- and there’d be a great many, even now at the tail end of Golden Week, when the castle was traditionally opened to the public for tours of the gardens and parts of the holiday festivities that took place on the grounds. Then he would shed the yukata he slept in and put on the gi and hakama he practiced in and spend at least the next hour in the dōjō pounding the snot out of selection of the castle’s security personnel who doubled as his training partners until the sun rose enough to light the sky, when he would repair to the exterior yard and the archery butts, where he would spend at least another hour, by which time most of the rest of the castle would be starting to stir. Then he’d come back inside, shower, dress according to the scheduled demands of the day, and would not set foot inside his private quarters again until it was time to retire for the evening, no matter how late that evening might be, or unless he had work to do that could be conducted in his home office. One could set a clock by him. In fact, Genji just had.

The timer chimed thirty minutes and Genji stirred from the light meditative doze into which he’d fallen, just in time to hear the whisper-soft footfalls passing his door in the corridor beyond. That would be Hanzo, leaving for his morning constitutional, since the idea of lingering over food was something he’d given up years before under the demands of his station and a million working lunches. For a moment, those footfalls paused, and for a moment Genji entertained the alarming idea that his brother might knock at his door, might come into his quarters without particularly craving permission to do so as was his right as lord of the Shimada Clan, might discover him  _ actually in his own bed _ and therefore available, and ruin everything on today of all days. But none of those disasters occurred and after a long, tense moment in which Genji breathed shallowly and silently willed his brother to move on, he did so, footsteps almost inaudibly soft on the ancient wooden floors. Genji waited a few heartbeats, a few breaths more and then slid into motion himself, slithering out of his bed, fully clothed, out onto the private balcony overlooking the inner gardens his quarters enjoyed, and up the side of the castle. He caught a glimpse of Hanzo making his way through those gardens as he slipped over the far side of the roof and then a heartbeat, a breath later he was dropping onto his brother’s balcony and slipping into his rooms.

He had no more than twenty minutes to achieve his goal before Hanzo’s personal servants returned to finish straightening his bed, hanging his clothing to air, making certain his toiletries and towels were fully supplied, to run fresh water in his private bath. Fortunately, he only needed five, even with the additional effort required to bypass the security system standing sentinel over his brother’s home office, immediately adjoining his sitting room. The office, unlike the rest of his quarters, was furnished in a sleekly modernist fashion, all custom hard-light work surfaces and bespoke hover-furniture in tastefully expensive materials, the thoroughly soundproofed, scan-proofed walls punctuated with original holoprints of the castle, of Hanamura’s many lovely shrines, of the mountain, all of it surrounding a desk that would not have looked out of place in the Prime Minister’s residence, which was actually Hanzo’s personal computer interface. From that desk, he could monitor every strand of his vast criminal empire, the majority of all its incoming and outgoing communications, be immediately informed of the success or failure or general progress of any of the Clan’s endeavors at any hour of the day or night, and he frequently sought that information, particularly on the many, many nights that he retired without actually intending to rest. The kumichō’s work, it seemed, was never actually done.

It was the rather assiduous and well-constructed security precautions built into the Shimada-gumi’s private network that in truth required his presence here, in the ridiculously early hours of his own birthday, to retrieve the tiny, unobtrusive piece of technology he had installed six months before. “A one-way data and communications collation device,” his handler had called it, which was likely more than he strictly needed to know but which helped him decide on placement, since it didn’t need to be inserted into a data port but it did need to avoid detection for the duration of its presence. No larger that the nail on his smallest finger, fitting neatly inside an equally tiny scan-proof case that doubled as a portable charging device, that he slid away inside his clothes as he made good his escape. Six months of arms deals and drug shipments and worse, quasi-legal tax evasion schemes and genuine humanitarian outreach, bog-standard local police bribery and delicate political machinations that might take years yet to bear fruit. The beating heart of the Clan.

Genji slipped back into his own rooms, retrieved the two-way secured communications device he kept stored in the bottom of a box of semi-functional wireless game controllers, and sent a text.  _ Package acquired. _ Then he doused himself in half a bottle of the most obnoxious cologne he owned and a somewhat smaller amount of cheap sake, climbed over the exterior wall, and made an impossible to ignore show of strolling in a state of obvious dishevelment through the main gate security checkpoint just at shift change, for the edification of the staff, and swung through the kitchens to retrieve some breakfast of his own. He hadn’t, after all, shut down every bar in town and was running on two thousand fewer calories than he usually had on board. By the time he made it back to his room, juggling a bowl of tamago and a canned energy drink, his actual phone was pinging with remonstrances from uncles and cousins asking what his plans for the day were. The remonstrances he ignored. The cousins he replied to with a variety of vague half-plans. The most important response was on his secured comm anyway.

_ Dead drop at the following coordinates. _ And then an alphanumeric string that resolved to the courtyard outside the arcade a few blocks away, where one could find any number of delinquents idling away the hours and also a selection of vending machines and garbage cans -- he suspected he’d be able to tell which one he’d need when he got there.  _ Prepare for extraction no later than 0630 tomorrow. _

And there it was.

Genji Shimada carefully stashed both his comm and the treason he’d carried out of his brother’s rooms, gulped down his breakfast, and went to grab a shower of his own. He had some things yet to do and not a lot of time in which to accomplish them.

 

***

 

The military surplus backpack he’d bought to be his go-bag lay still in its plastic wrapper along with its attachments in the back of his closet; he fished it out while waiting for his refreshed hair color to develop and began packing. A week’s worth of socks and underwear went into one of the smaller molle pouches and a selection of still-sealed toiletries plus his toothbrush went into another. The tablet he’d purchased and never connected to the Clan’s network, loaded at municipal hotspots with his favorite games and programs, movies and music, books and pictures, went into the padded, scan-resistant tech pouch. He had no idea where he was going to be extracted  _ to _ and subsequently dithered over actual clothes, finally deciding to err on the side of soft and warm but stylish with one set of moderately dressy plus a real knitted sweater and a sweatshirt from his alma mater. He clipped the bits together, made certain everything was zipped firmly shut, and stashed it back in his closet.

By the time he emerged again from the bathroom, toweling his freshly re-greened hair dry, the rest of the castle was well and truly alive. Down in the gardens, the groundskeepers were directing the freshly admitted vendors to the spots set aside to set up their kiosks where, in a few short hours, they’d be selling chimaki and kashiwamochi, sugar candies in the shape of kabuto and shaved ice doused in sweet syrup, bowls of ramen and tea and hot sake to the hordes of locals and tourists who’d come pouring through the castle’s open doors for the annual Children’s Day celebrations. Before the end of the day, the castle’s eves and battlements would be hung with strands of koinobori hoisted by families belonging to the Clan and families indebted to the Clan and families in no way related to the Clan but who were willing to pay a small fee for the privilege. It would make a lovely scene of traditional Japanese culture, the pictures of which would eventually grace the websites and brochures of the legit small group tour business the Clan operated.

The slender pole atop the castle, however, would bear no flags, as it hadn’t since their father passed. The lord of the Shimada Clan was not yet married, the negotiations for the disposition of his hand having slowed to a glacial pace around points of protocol and precedence so arcane and picky that the Imperial Household Agency might have told the people involved in crafting them to unclench a little. Hanzo legitimately did not appear to care if those proceedings consumed a substantial portion of the rest of his life, but then his entire input into the selection of his eventual wife and the mother of his children had consisted of receiving a list of prospective spouses and being asked to rank them in order of most to least tolerable. Genji supposed he couldn’t blame him for lacking enthusiasm for the fourth-ranked choice on a list of five who was nonetheless the favored candidate of the Clan’s elders but he did wish, wistfully, that he would at least hang their family’s flags for his birthday, if no other reason. Their father had always made a special ceremony of it for him, the born lucky double fifth child, and his heart still ached a little, his eyes still burned a bit, as he leaned on the balustrade and watched the early arrivals making their way down the freshly swept garden paths, dressed in their best kimono and carrying their brightly colored carp flags. Wondered, briefly, if it was worth the risk and the effort to break into the storage rooms and steal the old flags to carry away with him, a memento of the life he was about to leave behind.

An hour later he was brushing the dust out of his acid green hair and adding the tightly wrapped bundle of flags to his go-bag, dumping another set of grimy clothes into the hamper and seriously considering suggesting that the head of the household servants have a stern word with the cleaning staff, and redressing when his comm chimed with the unique tone he’d assigned to his brother. For a panicked moment he vividly imagined that someone had already discovered the theft and gone complaining, a fear immediately allayed by the contents of the message itself:  _ I have arranged a private family meal for your birthday this evening. It would please me greatly if you would attend. _

Which was, all things being equal, the  _ nicest _ of his brother’s extensively curated selection of politely worded commands. Three years ago, he would have said  _ yes _ because his brother had least made the effort of pretending to ask, even if none of his actual friends or favorite cousins were invited. Two years ago, he might have said  _ yes _ just for the purpose of keeping the peace, because nothing ruined the memory of genuine birthday pleasures like Hanzo unloading two barrels of passive-aggressively  _ disappointed _ elder brother and coldly disapproving Head of the Clan at point-blank range while he was trying to cope with the inevitable post-real-celebration hangover.

_ This _ year he texted  _ I’ll be there _ and immediately began making extensive plans to be anywhere else, all night, because there was no force in the universe that would make him spend any significant portion of his last birthday at home, in Hanamura, possibly in Japan, surrounded by stonily disapproving and sour old men, but an answer in the affirmative would at least put Hanzo off for the majority of the day. He wasn’t exactly sure how well he’d cope with Hanzo prodding him for a response every hour on the hour and a part of him didn’t want to remember his last communications with his brother being a nerve-scraping annoyance. Deliberate deception was at least common enough between them that he found himself not feeling even a little bit bad about it as he climbed over the back wall and dropped into the alley beyond.

He did, after all, have a mission to complete.

 

***

 

The arcade was already busy by the time he strolled through the front doors, crammed to the walls with teenagers desperately attempting to avoid the embarrassment of being dragged along on family outings by their desperately uncool parents. Scattered among them were more than a handful of younger Clan brothers and cousins, idly making bets on the outcomes of the card tourneys going on upstairs, rooking fifteen year olds out of the their spending credit, doing the occasional concentration-and-reflexes enhancing substance deal before the Fighters of the Storm invitational later in the afternoon. He spotted a familiar face amid the throng and ambled over to drop a friendly arm across Heiji’s shoulders where he sat dealing out a round of Hanafuda and nuzzled his ear in greeting. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Well well well. The birthday boy himself.” Heiji leaned back and gave him a heavy-lidded look so laden with promise that it sent an anticipatory frisson down his spine. “Got plans for later?”

“Dodging dinner with the elders. Otherwise, my schedule is wide open.” Genji grinned toothily at him, skated an arm down his chest to fish a pack of smokes out of his shirt pocket and shamelessly steal one. “You?”

“Oh, yes.” Heiji gave him a lazy smile of his own. “Want in?”

“Nah.” He did, however, accept the offered light and breathed deep. “I’ve got some things to do before tonight.”

“Meet at Izumi’s place?” Heiji laid his head back for a kiss and Genji obliged.

“I’ll be there.” And he would -- Izumi’s place meant Heiji was planning something  _ genuinely delicious _ . “What time?”

“Seven. Sharp.” Heiji reached up and brushed a hand through his hair. “Don’t be late, koibito.”

“Never.” The nonstandard additives in the cigarette hit his bloodstream, sending a warm and vaguely euphoric wave through him as he made his way through the press toward the courtyard exit, palming the listening device as he made a show of fishing around in his pocket for a credit chip.

The comm in his ear chimed a telltale tune as he stepped into the courtyard proper, the Nano Cola jingle, the largest of the several vending machines scattered about. He treated himself to a Nano Peach and enough candy to cause a diabetic coma if he ate it all himself, slotting the listening device ahead of his chip, the comm in his ear chirping as the vending machine ingested it and confirmed delivery. He popped the tab on his drink and strolled off, lobbing Kit-Kats and fruit chews into groups of startled kids as he went, wandering the narrow, pedestrians-and-scooters only streets of the old town with no particular destination in mind, thinking fixedly of nothing for as long as his can and smoke lasted, trying not to see the normal, happy families he shared them with.

 

***

 

The Omnic Crisis Memorial Park was, despite its grim origins, one of his father’s favorite places in all of Hanamura, lying almost precisely at the junction of the deliberately preserved cobblestone footpaths of the old town and the wider mass-transit friendly streets of the post-Crisis metropolitan core, the massive pylons holding the elevated shinkansen tracks forming the southernmost border, the final block of pensioner-occupied nagaya forming the north. Between was an expanse of greenery -- carefully tended copses of trees, artfully arranged selections of shrubbery and flower beds, expanses of manicured lawn punctuated with a man-made stream, ponds, a waterfall, memorial circles of wooden benches surrounding polished granite stele bearing the names of residents who’d died during the Crisis. Sojiro had loved it because, unlike the genetically engineered, eternally blooming sakura in the castle’s world famous gardens, the trees there bloomed and faded, changed colors and withered and fell in accord with the rhythm of the seasons and, as he had grown older and his health had begun to fail, he found comfort in that. When they’d been younger, he and Hanzo had loved it because, unlike their own gardens, nobody chased the ducks away and almost no one objected when they fell in the ponds. Or at least no one whose opinion mattered, right there and then. Once a week, every week, for as much of his childhood as he could remember, his father had made the time to lift him up onto his broad shoulders and take Hanzo by the hand, to walk down to the park, to buy ice cream from the vending machines at the entrance and pretend, for some small space of time, that they were just a father and his sons not the kumichō of the Shimada-gumi and his heirs.

During the last year of his life, Sojiro had been too ill to make the trip himself and so Genji made it for him, took pictures of the trees as they’d changed through the year and brought them to him, pressed blossoms and colorful leaves in waxed paper between the pages of old books. He made a point of never attending at his father’s sickbed at the same time as Hanzo, who came there primarily to report and run interference with the elders, a vital enough service but one that didn’t leave a whole lot of room for tender displays of filial concern. Not that Hanzo was very good at  _ feelings _ to begin with but the stress of coping with their father’s imminent mortality and his own formal accession to the hot seat systematically stripped him of any ability to behave like a decent human being and Genji found it significantly less painful just to avoid him altogether.

“Your brother is not as terrible as you think him now, Sparrow.” His father, frail and withered, had whispered to him, a few days before he’d died. “His heart is in conflict with his mind and what he knows to be his duty. What he needs, more than anything, is wise counsel.”

“No one ever accused me of  _ wisdom _ , father.” Genji had replied, which was both true and also a dodge, he was resigned enough now to admit, if only to himself.

And then it was too late.

The worst part of it was that he’d known was his father was asking, even if he hadn’t said it in so many words. Sojiro was the one who’d pushed hardest to diversify the Clan’s activities in terms of legitimate business interests in the wake of the Omnic Crisis, who had seen that course as a means of extracting themselves entirely from their criminal origins. He’d wanted that, for them, and Genji at least had known it -- known also how deeply he’d loathed and how vigorously he’d rejected the many, many,  _ many _ proposals to profit more than they already did from the Clan’s humanitarian endeavors. Sojiro had loathed the entire idea with such cold ferocity that, after he’d ordered the head of one particularly pushy uncle who’d ignored his orders on the topic delivered on an antique lacquered rosewood platter, the uncles had actually stopped pushing him to okay the trafficking of traumatized disaster survivors.

Hanzo? Hanzo was another story entirely. The push there began as soon as their father started handing off more and more of his duties as his illness had progressed, ceded more and more of the daily operational authority to the man who would, very shortly, succeed him.

He had known his father was asking him to be the advisor, the counselor that would remind his brother of what their father had believed and wanted, the shield that would stand between Hanzo and the demands of the rest of the Clan. He had, with the serenity of three years of emotional distance, admit that he’d been none of the above: Sojiro’s death had built a wall of shock and grief and pain that, while shared, had pushed them further apart instead of drawing them together. He’d  _ let _ it push them apart, and now it was far, far too late to pull them back together again. He’d known that since the hour Hanzo had ignored him when he’d burst into his brother’s office to argue fiercely against the plans he’d just agreed to implement, knew he’d forfeited the chance to be what his father had wanted him to be, knew there was nothing he could say or do, except throw away the last shreds of Sojiro in his soul, to find his way back to Hanzo’s side.

And that was the thing he would not, would never do.

He bought himself a strawberry ice cream from the vending machines and settled down in his favorite spot under the maples near the largest of the duck ponds to eat it. He was sucking the last of the flavor off the stick when the secured comm in his back pocket vibrated with an incoming text.

_ Package retrieved. Well done. _ A second alphanumeric coordinate string.  _ 0630\. Don’t be late, Agent Shimada. _

 

***

 

Music was pouring out the windows of Izumi’s place by the time Genji strolled up, multicolored lights casting reflections across the neighboring buildings and the alley beyond, and the door jerked open before he could even properly knock. Heiji caught him by the front of his shirt and yanked him into the sort of kiss that bypassed his higher faculties completely and went straight to his cock, his tongue tasting of something probably three-fifths alcoholic, one-third hallucinogenic, and completely illegal according to every drug schedule known to man. Genji savored the flavor even as he made a mental note to absolutely avoid consuming any because he had an early morning rendezvous to make and he strongly suspected indulging in that direction would spell insurmountable doom. Even so, his hands settled on Heiji’s ass with an intent almost totally separate from any higher, or saner, impulses. “Was that my present?”

“The first of many.” Heiji purred and licked his lips and pulled him the rest of the way inside, into the warmth and the music, the press of hot, eager bodies and hands and mouths.

Genji woke, for values of woke that were a great deal closer to  _ regaining consciousness _ than he’d actually hoped for, sonic drilled through the skull by the goddamned alarm he’d forgotten to disable and which required significantly more effort to turn off, since getting hold of his phone involved extricating himself from a mass of entangled limbs and covers and soft sleeping surfaces, all of which encumbered his knees and ankles and tried to slide out from under his feet. He was pretty sure he accidentally kicked more than one person, probably a lot more than one, first crawling and then quick-stepping through the fuck-pile spread out on Izumi’s whole-second-story bedroom floor, to search through the assorted piles of discarded clothing occupying every horizontal surface not already playing host to intertwined lovers and quite a few of the ones that were. He finally found his shirt and pants wedged between the wall and a futon that smelled like someone had doused it in birthday cake flavored vodka -- he vaguely remembered something liquid and birthday cake flavored -- and pulled them both free. Fortunately, his personal phone was still in his shirt pocket and the secured comm was still in the zipped-closed cargo pocket of his pants and it was godforsaken o’clock and he had time to make it back to castle and scoop up his go-bag without even having to run.

Well.

Maybe a little bit of running.

He turned off the alarm and dismissed the twenty-three texts and six missed phone calls from Hanzo’s private number. He pulled his clothes on over skin still sticky with substances he didn’t want to think about too deeply, since he probably had time to grab a shower, and found his shoes lurking under the head of a passed-out-drunk cousin who thankfully hadn’t puked in them, though they were a little wet with drool. He sat on the curb outside to pull them on, let the cool too-early-to-be-night, too-dark-to-be-morning air clear his head, breathed deep, to etch the memory of how his city smelled and tasted into place before he left it, probably forever. Indulged in a momentary spasm of regret as he rose and stretched, savored the ache of it: he  _ liked _ Heiji, he liked  _ most _ of the small-time cousins, hoped that most of them would be considered fish too little to be bothered with when the hammer inevitably dropped.

He picked up his pace to a long-legged lope the closer he came to the castle, avoided the gates entirely, re-entered the same way he’d left the day before, pulled himself up onto his balcony. A quick glance showed his rooms empty and untouched, even by the housekeeping staff, his bed still in the artistic disarray he’d left it in, and he padded into the bathroom to shower and change. The sky was just beginning to gray in the east with false dawn as he emerged, extracted fresh clothing from his closet, two slim boxes, one of which went into an outside pocket of his go-bag, and the other of which he opened. There, nestled in smooth black velvet, was the last birthday gift his father had given him, months before his actual birthday, and days before his death: a cloisonne stud in shades of brown and blushing pink, a stylized sparrow on the wing, and a hoop, equally stylized in acid green and gold, a dragon biting its own tail. He slid them into place, for the first time, picked up his bag in one hand and his shoes in the other, and dropped over the balcony balustrade into the garden, loped through the puddles of light and shadow cast by the tōrō in the direction of the family shrine. There was one last thing he wanted to do, before he left home for the last time.

The shrine was cool as he stepped inside, the ceramic heaters disguised as genuine charcoal braziers long cold, the constantly-burning lights turned to their lowest yield. Barefoot, he padded across the tatami-covered floor, sat down his bag, and knelt before the kamidana, extracting the second box. The incense was Sojiro’s favorite, resinous and spicy and not the slightest hint of sweet, and he bowed his head as the smoke curled upward into the dark.

_ Father, I do not know if you would have made the choice I have to achieve your goals -- but I hope, if this choice pleases you, it will give your spirit peace and, if it does not, you will forgive me for it when we meet again. _

Behind him, on the stair, he heard a whisper, the faintest hint of sound, a step.


End file.
